Technology is changing how we engage in politics.

While at Penn State, I took a number of communications courses to supplement my political science studies by exploring the relationship between media and democracy (the aptly named Media and Democracy or the Cultural Aspects of Mass Media, for example). These courses helped to develop my current understanding of the reciprocal nature between the two. Rapid change in information technology has been met with rapid political change.

In the United States, then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama raised unprecedented campaign funds through small donors utilizing a web-centric approach. After his inauguration, the President moved the weekly address from the airwaves and onto YouTube. Similarly, small but outspoken organizations dominate the political discourse, whether the TEA Party in 2009 or the Occupy movement, utilizing social media to mobilize. Meanwhile, protest in Iran, riots in London, and the Arab Spring generated much debate about the potential to destabilize the reigning hierarchy, all centered around social media and mobile communication. Even as I write this, Invisible Children’s now-infamous Kony 2012 video has achieved the dubious distinction of the most viral video ever.

Being an effective communicator requires more than producing content, it demands the critical consumption of the same. In more traditional lexicon, it demands active listening skills. But as we adapt to new modes of communication, moving beyond traditional mediums of speech and print, we must acquire new literacies as well, the ability to engage new material in a critical and constructive manner. As Ernest Hemingway observed in Across the River and Into the Trees:

When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.